Modesty Blaise (Modesty Blaise series)

A character in the DCI Banks novel I was reading looked up to Modesty Blaise as her role model. When the police procedure in DCI Banks began to drag, I decided to give this book a whirl. I knew it was from 1965, and I was prepared for camp, but the book still annoyed the heck out of me. Modesty Blaise is a male fantasy! The lengthy weapons discussions are a bore. "The sex isn't sexy," to quote a UK reviewer. Willie's dialect gets old (but I have a low tolerance for dialect). Modesty herself is a paragon, of course, but you don't really get inside her head. The other female characters are pathetically dumb and expendable. If you're expecting a fun, feminist James Bond, you will fling the book across the room in disgust. I did, several times.

Peter O'Donnell is no longer among us, but his great characters remain. Modesty Blaise and her side-kick, Willie Garvin, are unique action heroes, in that they have no pattern but their own, no stereotype. Also, most if not all of the subsidiary characters are wonderfully vivid right along with Modesty and Willie.All of this is a mighty spice to the many Modesty stories, again uniquely terrific in two print formats, prose and illustrated strips. This new volume is the last but one of the series, which reproduces all of the strips over forty-odd years. Add eleven novels and two volumes of shorter stories, almost none of which are done in both formats.Stylistically there a strong resemblances, but O'Donnell very seldom told a story more than once, over his entire voluminous body of work. He also killed his stars in a final prose story. He may have done so in the final strip story also, but we haven't seen that one yet. It's to be out maybe this year, maybe next. Stay tuned, to collect the entire sequence of strip stories!

Imagine my surprise when I discovered the Modesty Blaise series in conjunction with the hullabaloo over The Girl series by Stieg Larsson. I consider myself a well read mystery fan and I had never heard of this series. According to what I read, Modesty was one of the characters that Lisbeth was modeled after. Well, just like with Lisbeth, I fell in literary love with Modesty. What a wonderful series ala the female James Bond like character, although that does not do justice to her character. And the relationship between Modesty and Willie her partner in crime is a wonder to behold. I just wonder if we could all learn from their relationship. You don't have to be sexually involved to be VERY close to someone from the opposite sex. In any case once I read the first book "Modest Blaise" I was hooked. I immediately put together the entire series from a variety of sources. I am happily ensconsed in the AC reading about Modesty and Willie and their latest caper while it is horrid outside. I hate to admit it, but they even brought the occasional tear to my eye, and this from a hard-boiled life long mystery/suspense reader. You can't go wrong. Buy it today and you'll be hooked.

I learned of Modesty Blaise when reading "The Psychology of The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo" by Robin S. Rosenberg who mentions Stieg Larson was a big fan of the Modesty books. Modesty is a tough, brilliant and beautiful woman along the lines of The Avenger's Mrs. Peale, but more deadly. She is expert in martial arts and a variety of weapons. If these books were wrtten in this decade instead of the 60's, she would probably also be computer geek extraordinaire . Don't be put off by the tacky cover illustrations, the books are about brilliant, daring and often outlandish escapades (including - spoiler alert - shooting a defector over the Berlin Wall via a circus canon) rather than sexual encounters, which are plentiful but not explicit, very much a la Ian Fleming's James Bond and with humor like Lawrence Block's Tanner series. The books are entertaining, clever, humorous, thrilling and very well wriiten. I'm sorry there are only 13 books and the author sadly is no more.If you want to read them in order:Modesty BlaiseSabre ToothI, LuciferA Taste For DeathImpossible VirginPieces of ModestyThe Silver MistressLast Day In LimboDragon's ClawThe Xanadu TalismanThe Night of MorningstarDead Man's HandleCobra Trap

Ten million dollars in diamonds are being given to an Arab sheik, but Gabriel, a master criminal plans on taking the diamonds somewhere in shipment. Britain is worried, and already they’ve lost two top agents. But living in England is a lady who ran the Outfit, a large criminal enterprise that stretched around the world. She’s retired now, though only 26, and British powers believe she may be able to prevent the theft of the diamonds. This is the first novel in the Modesty Blaise series, and gives the readers some background on the characters. A 1966 movie was made of the novel, and it followed the book fairly well, but was done strictly for laughs. The movie was a comedy that shouldn’t have been made, sadly. The Modesty Blaise series was a great action series, featuring the title character and her assistant, Willie Garvin.

It's a standard-issue trade paperback - not appreciably better or worse than any other trade paperback. If you like the contents it's great; if you don't, you could use it to level a table that has one very short leg.

I ordered this after reading everything O'Donnell read under the pen name Madeline Brent. I have to say that I absolutely LOVE Modesty Blaise.O'Donnell is truly a master of the action/adventure genre. Blaise has been compared to James Bond, but I think the comparison does no favors for either character. Aside from the espionage elements, they are quite different protagonists with different agendas. That said, they do give you that super cool 1960s experience that people like Tarantino try so hard to emulate (and sometimes succeed) in their films.If you haven't read O'Donnell then you should.

This was a brand new book. No dog eared pages, or bends to the cover. For the price it was well worth it, and it was delivered fast. Oh, the book is a really fun read, as it deals with somewhat lurid subject manner in a very stoic British fashion. It is a true classic.

This is from 1965, and is the first of the Modesty Blaise text novels. We take for granted female action heroes these days. Kill Bill, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider etc , but Modesty was the first.We get hints of her origins here, from the ruins of World War Two, a ragged girl orphan, escaping from displaced person's camps in the middle east, becoming an animal hearder in the desert, getting an education from an elderly refugee savant, drifting into crime, excelling in crime and becoming a boss in her teens. After making her fortune, she moves to London with Willie Garvin, the Watson to her Holmes, and retires aged 26, beautiful young sophisticated and an expert in weapons and combat.After working for British intelligence, she and Willie become adventurers, spies, and thieves for another 12 novels and 38 years of newspaper strip cartoons. Glancing through some of these strips and lurid book covers, one would be forgiven for dismissing Modesty Blaise's adventures as archaic and sexist soft porn. Not so. What the reader will find is intelligently written, intricately plotted very stylish crime thrillers. They are very human at their core, humorous, touching and generally much better written than one would expect.This adventue, the first Modesty text story, introduces the characters and has Modesty and Willie attempting to foil a diamond robbery. We have memorable villains, sparkling and quotable dialogue, and very well done violence. Far from being some male writer's unrealistic fantasy woman, O'Donnell's Modesty is a thoughtful piece of work, complex, privately vulnerable, totally independant and very clever.He is a writer who simply does female characters and dialogue unquestionably well. Willie Garvin is a great creation too, his and Modesty's near psychic teamwork is one of this books main draws.Obviously Fleming's influence is there, the globetrotting, the affluence, the luxury product placement, the spy gadgets and hardware descriptions, the physical nuances of the villains and the sex. It is surprising that Modesty Blaise is not as well known as Bond perhaps because no decent movie has been made. The dialogue and violence do remind me of Tarrantino, and this book does feature in Pulp Fiction. Perhaps we may see some decent movie version at some point. But it wont be as good as these books.

Lovers of Modesty and Willie will not be disappointed and if you have no idea who they are then this is as good as almost any of the series of these graphic serials, originally published in the London Evening Standard but later syndicalised worldwide, to start with, running from the 60's to the 90's and capturing exciting story lines with period detail; if you first encountered Modesty Blaise through the dreadful film with Monica Vitti then this may come as a surprise otherwise it's great - three complete stories in each volume and consistently good!

If your considering reading this series for the first time you'll enjoy an old fashioned, good clean excitement, with a great touch of humour and some expert human skills... I enjoyed the series first time round and delighted to have the chance to re read!

It's a good book and I am enjoying it.

I have rekindled ( pardon the pun ) my love of Modesty Blaise and look forward to reading the rest of the series from Peter O'Donnell